when i'm teaching regardless of what techniques i am showing or explaining it seems that the student will inevitably ask me what kind of gear i'm using or what kind of gear they should get. The answer is always the same. "what do you want to accomplish?" the second question is "will you carry it?" The former is a blog entry for another day. The second one is what I'm going to talk about right now. You'd be surprised how many people say something along the lines of "i don't want to carry....it's too heavy, big, expensive, etc etc" and that is a perfectly great answer if you give it up front. If you buy and then don't carry it then you threw good money away when you could have "measured twice and cut once" - 

What I'm getting to is that the best gear on the planet is worthless if you don't carry it. 4.5 years ago i sold my 1DII and ended up with a 5DII. Lots of my friends said "don't you feel like that's a toy?" - "isn't the AF terrible?" or some other riff on those two themes. The new camera I was carrying was inferior to the old one. But the key word in that sentence was "carrying" - the 5DII (and now the III) were in my hands nearly all the time. I carried it to work, to the gym, to the park. Everywhere. I could never say that about the 1DII. I'm a big guy and it got tiresome. I've had similar situations with my tripod. I went from a heavy duty beauty of a tripod down to a traveler type and people say "will it hold....?" or "do you trust that?" - the answer is yes. I have to hang a bag from the hook under the center column but i have the tripod with me which was very rarely the case with the old one.

Buy Gear you will carry. Carry the gear you buy. 

and whatever you are carrying - shoot1